Daphne Oram – devizine.com

Oramics and its Place in the Progression of Electronic Music

In 1997 I was a 24 year-old factory worker, keen to learn all tasks on the production line to work my way up, but suddenly the run of the ladder was pulled too high for me to reach. Shift managers who had were axed, were replaced by “team leaders,” that of precisely the same duties and responsibilities, though you needed a diploma to apply.

The government tried to thwart my only other life objective three years past, to party; they had failed. I worked in the factory now for one reason, to fund this escapism. Once free, the Criminal Justice Bill ensured someone profited from our jollity, as rave culture was pushed into nightclubs and legal paid events.

If The Prodigy were right, this was music for the jilted generation, perhaps so too was Luigi Russolo in his 1913 futurist manifesto L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises,) when he argued that the ear would become accustomed to a new sonic palette of industrial soundscapes, and musicians would require a new approach to instrumentation and composition. Though I’d not have contemplated the noises of the factory manipulating my music perceptions at the time, I was aware of how Kraftwerk were influenced by the sounds of traffic for Autobahn.

Neither would I have given much thought to the development of electronic music; my time with analogue pop of punk and Two-Tone was short-lived. Through new wave post-punk and electronica to American hip hop and electro, and the rebellion from the hit factories exploiting it; rave culture, I had grown up with electronics as a staple to music and knew no different.

Pre-internet research on the subject would’ve been a needle in a haystack, even if I’d the motivation to study it. In my naivety I assumed one thing, that Kraftwerk created electronic music, because I’d seen a clip of them on the BBC program Tomorrow’s World. Though the show made no claim to this, I was only two on the 25th September 1975, when it originally aired.

Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s Kraftwerk were certainly pioneers who popularised the krautrock genre worldwide. The industrial links between Dusseldorf and Detroit and creative ones between Berlin and New York were influences reflected, which turned the cogs of hip hop and house. And now, here I was, in a meadow near Luton, at Universe’s Tribal Gathering, where I figured we’d come full circle.

Kraftwerk played their one and only festival, it was monumental. The once monocultured rave phenomenon had divided into copious subgenres, Universe were the first to fully embrace this with a tent dedicated to each division. Yet from each tent masses united at the main stage, some DJs refusing to play their set because they’d miss this performance. Reflecting back on it now, I cannot deny it was something to behold, but I’ve since discovered they wasn’t the complete roots to electronic music I assumed they were. Its complex international evolution includes too many names to mention, but this fascinating insight has been encouraged by my study into one important innovator largely uncredited, born here in Devizes, Daphne Oram.

We outlined her work briefly in the introduction to this series of articles, and with help from Daphne’s niece, Carolyn Scales, we delved into her upbringing in Devizes, and how influences in engineering meshed with her love of music. Now we need to fit her role into this vast evolution of electronic music, by looking at Oramics, discovering how that influenced the progression, and why it is not as well documented and I believe it should be.

Once Daphne left the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1959, she coined the term Oramics, a name for her studio in Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat in Kent, her technique for creating graphical sound, and the Oramics Machine which spawned from it.

Carolyn described The Oramics Machine as, “an early synthesiser,” but as with Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin who created photoelectronic instrument the ANS synthesizer, historical records rarely reference them. The first commercial synthesizer is credited to American engineer Robert Moog a few years later in 1964. Precursors to Moog mentions Harald Bode who laid the groundwork for separate sound-modifying modules used in the Moog design, the Hammond Organ Company’s Novachord in the late 1930s, Canadian engineer Hugh Le Caine’s Electronic Sackbut, Herbert Belar and Harry Olson’s RCA Mark I and II Sound Synthesizers, and some cite Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, an electromechanical sound generator from 1897, which weighed in over two-hundred tons.

The original Oramics Machine was the size of an office photocopier, so was also too cumbersome for the average musician. By its definition, it’s a synthesiser but worked differently; the composer/musician drew onto a set of 35mm film strips which ran past a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical signals to control amplitude, timbre, frequency and duration.

The reason for the omission, Carolyn suggested, was because The Oramics Machine was lost after her passing. “Dr Mick Grierson’s team tracked it down to France in 2008. Working with the Science Museum. Grierson’s study provided the first full contextualisation of the machine, an assessment of its historical importance, and a detailed description of its workings. The machine became a central part of the Science Museum exhibition Oramics to Electronica, originally planned to run for six months in 2011. The show’s press and public uptake saw it extended a further four years.”

Perhaps inspired by Moog’s development of the Minimoog, Daphne worked on a Mini-Oramics, but never completed a prototype. Goldsmiths’ PhD student Tom Richards, who pored over the unfinished project and built it over forty years later, suggested “there were a lot of reasons why she didn’t launch Mini-Oramics. She was working on her own, and wasn’t affiliated to a large organisation or university. She had ups and downs in her life, and at the time she was working on Mini-Oramics, she also worried that her approach to musical research was out of fashion when compared to chance-based and computerised techniques. She was unable to secure the further funding she needed and she eventually moved on to other research.”

If funding and the ferocity of music technology’s progression at this time surpassed Daphne, both her music and written works were visionary. If you thought Pete Tong’s Heritage Orchestra was pushing new boundaries in 2004, Carolyn noted, “in 1948, Daphne created a piece for double orchestra, turntable and live electronics called Still Point, long thought of as the earliest composition to include real-time electronic transformation of instrumental sounds.” Again, Still Point was never performed and was considered lost. “Dr James Bulley found fragments in the Oram archive,” she continued, “and working collaboratively with Dr Shiva Feshareki, began a reconstruction, later finding the full score in the belongings of composer Hugh Davies.”

“A performance was commissioned by BBC Proms and performed by turntablist Shiva Feshareki, Bulley, and the London Contemporary Orchestra in 2018 at the Royal Albert Hall, reaching a substantial audience live and via BBC Radio 3,” Carolyn explained. “The reaction was one of awe, with the piece described as “thrilling”. Critical responses suggested that this realisation of Oram’s previously untested ideas represented a challenge to electronic music’s received history.”

The more I research the more I find examples suggesting Daphne’s work was so avant-garde, abstract or insistent on anthropological creativity against trending dehumanised mathematical methods, she was set apart from the contemporary canon of self-generating computer music, positioning her work in a kind of unique scientific-spiritual space, combining technical rigor with a romantic model of artistic expression. This would frustrate her, when projects were either underfunded or too radical for others to follow, and they were consequently lost in time.

In 1971 she authored a book titled An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, wherein lies a quote often cited in discussions about music technology: “We will be entering a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, computers will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics.”

It was also her dedication to authorial control, while cybernetic-influenced composers embraced self-generating systems with indeterminacy, which caused Oram’s approach to differ from the era’s prevailing trends, despite this cybernetic orientation. Exemplifying the generosity of her father, James, Mayor of Devizes, Daphne actively supported composers’ rights to royalties while she was a Trustee of The Performing Rights Society in the 1970s.

Daphne Oram suffered two strokes during the nineties, and passed away in Maidstone on the 5th January 2003. Yet on Daphne’s centenary, where much of the world remains dubious about the ethics of artificial intelligence, we must debate her legacy, for my final part of the series.

Oh, and if you were wondering, all I saw of Kraftwerk at Tribal Gathering was the fluorescent outlines of their boilersuits!

Daphne Oram; Devizes’ Unsung Pioneer of Electronic Sound: Part 2

read the first part here

Daphne’s Family & Childhood Connection to Devizes

Celebrations of Daphne Oram have been building in London since the beginning of December, for those in the sphere of electronic music and music technology. On the first Thursday of the month The Barbican held a concert commemorating Daphne’s centenary, where sound and music fair access partner, Nonclassical, in partnership with The Oram Trust and Oram Awards played commissioned reimagined works from various contemporary electronic artists, inspired from tapes in Daphne’s archive. This has been released as the album, Vari/ations: An Ode To Oram.

London university Goldsmiths acquired Daphne’s archive in 2006, bringing her work into the wider public domain, after decades of relative obscurity. In the male dominated realm of electronic music, this has presented a better understanding of Daphne as a visionary in the early development of the genre, and in turn inspired female musicians and producers.

But our story begins rather differently, in the late nineteen-twenties, at Belle Vue House, Devizes, where a much younger Daphne is caught trying to climb inside the family piano! Daphne’s niece Carolyn Scales explained, “she was asked ‘why are you doing that?’ and Daphne replied, she wanted the piano to make a sound between the notes on the keyboard.”

I’m grateful to Carolyn for providing some fascinating background into Daphne’s family and childhood in Devizes, something overlooked by the insurmountable information available regarding her work.

“All the siblings enjoyed listening to classical music but only Daphne had the ability to create music,” she told me. “Ida’s sisters often joined her to play trios and quartets at Belle Vue House while James did learn to play the cello but was happy to stand aside for more competent players. In his defence James’s father’s diaries only mention one musical instrument at their home, a piano declared by a piano tuner as not worthy of tuning. Maybe we underestimate the strength of our Oram artistic genes.”

Daphne at five months, with mother, Ida, brothers *Arthur and John*

Daphne Blake Oram was born on the 31st December 1925, to James Oram (1890-1964) and Ida nee Talbot (1887-1972.) “Ida ,” Carolyn explained, “who at heart seems to have been a natural party goer, was plagued by ill health. Daphne was born in Ivy House Nursing Home not because of a fear of losing Daphne but because of Ida’s problems with her legs. In the first photograph of Daphne she is being held by Ida who is sitting in a wicker bath chair with Arthur and John in front of their new home of Belle Vue House.”

“Ida was born in Braintree, Essex into a family of drapers,” Carolyn said, “who soon moved to a shop on Maryport Street, Devizes, opposite the top of The Brittox, which they ran from 1888 until 1914. Unfortunately Ida’s father Alfred died in 1896 leaving her mother Alice nee Blake to run the business.” She continued to describe Alice’s six children helping at the shop, and its failure, though Ida was in charge of the millinery department, and how later there was a room in Belle Vue House devoted to her hats. Carolyn told of Ida’s painting hobby, in watercolours, oils and other mediums.

Talbot family with parents. Ida on swing with her twin

Daphne’s father, James, was known in Devizes as “Jim” or “Jimmy.” He was not Irish but proud of his upbringing off the coast of County Mayo, and “never lost his soft Irish brogue.” His father Arthur Oram was a farmer and land agent in one of the most deprived parts of rural Ireland, hit hard by the famines of the early 1800s, and as such it was a natural breeding ground for agrarian discontent, later producing some prominent members of the IRA. This caused James to be keenly aware of local injustices.

“In 1961, when James took us to see where he was born,” Carolyn expressed, “he told us he was upset that he was not allowed to go to school with his friends. They were Catholic and he was a Protestant and to highlight the differences James and his siblings had to travel to school in Newport by pony and trap, rather than walk to the local school.”

“I feel sure that our father John was correct in saying that if James had stayed in Ireland he would have become a renowned barrister. Unfortunately, just as James left school there was a change in the family’s fortunes as The Congested Districts Board on behalf of the British Government were, quite rightly buying estates and redistributing the land among farmers living on tenanted, uneconomic smallholdings.”

Therefore, instead of attending university at sixteen James travelled to Devizes, to help his uncle (by marriage,) Alfred Hinxman, the manager of the Devizes branch of a Salisbury coal merchant. James lived in Devizes for the rest his life, managing the coal merchant until his retirement. Overseeing the distribution of coal in the southwest during the Second World War, James was so horrified by the profiteering he didn’t take a penny for his efforts and received a MBE.

“James soon became a trusted member of the community,” Carolyn said, “active in its civic life, as a magistrate and a school governor. This included being Mayor of Devizes during The Abdication and coronation of George VI.”

“James also successfully became involved in many businesses including The Devizes Brick and Tile Co. Somehow James also found time for his interest in local history and was a member of various local societies. He could have become wealthy but instead gave away his excess income after ensuring that his family lived in a comfortable style. Every Sunday dinner during the depression of the 1930s they would discuss the families that the brickworks supported, carefully working out if they would have the money to feed their children. The discussion would end by choosing someone who was struggling to hire to cut the Belle Vue House lawn during the following week.”

*The Devizes Brick and Tile Co.* Photograph by HR Edmonds

James’ generous nature rubbed off on his children. Daphne actively supported composers’ rights to royalties while she was a Trustee of The Performing Rights Society in the 1970s. “In particular,” Carolyn noted, “Daphne helped to set up the PRS Members’ Fund that continues to support those registered with the PRS and their families when they are in need of financial help. During the 1980s Daphne arranged Christmas hampers for these families.”

Before Daphne was born the family lived in rooms above the coal merchant’s office at 7 High Street, Devizes. James wanted Belle Vue House, empty at the time but out of his price range, until the state of dilapidation dropped far enough, which was just as Daphne was being born. The house would have been at the end of Belle Vue Road, now replaced by Waiblingen Way housing estate.

Retired designer Paul Bryant, who still resides locally told me he grew up close to Belle Vue House, and recalled her returning to the family home and, “the excitement that was generated when she was awarded grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation.” Paul expressed “it is heartening to see the ancient horse chestnut tree, then at the end of the Oram’s garden, still surviving in Waiblingen Way.” Meanwhile, local musician Peter Easton has written in request for a blue plaque to be erected in Daphne’s honour.

Daphne, with the grass roller at Belle Vue House, Devizes

Carolyn explained how the sibling’s engineering abilities can also be traced to the Oram side of the family. “Their great uncle John had designed machinery to make barrels for Rockefeller’s oil, and their uncle Arthur oversaw many civil engineering projects in the Indus Valley, now in Pakistan.”

“Arthur, aged 9 and John, aged 5 were to share a bedroom with an adjoining dressing room that James agreed they would turn into a workshop,” Carolyn said. “They had already started their own tool kits and Arthur was delighted when James added a foot controlled fret saw.”

In a letter to John dated April 2003, Arthur wrote it would be the 77th anniversary of their move from the High Street to Belle Vue House: “Every 20th April was the day of an annual fair on the Green, and Hitler’s birthday. That one in 1926 was a very special wet Tuesday for us. Our mother was taken the half-mile in a big closed Bath Chair drawn by a man holding the long handle in front, because of her illness with a bad knee. She was helped into their old oak bed in the drawing room, on the right of the door towards the fireplace. In that room there was placed, near the door, the old radio that our mother had bought some years before from proceeds of her Barbola work, with its two bright emitter valves and six volt battery, from which we had news through the general strike of 1926.”

“Later the workshop became home to John’s lathe and of great interest to Daphne. John told me that he was sometimes very mean to Daphne when she came to the workshop. At first she had to stay outside the open door and be silent, if she passed that test she was allowed to stand just inside the door for a while before coming closer to John and even helping when possible. John taught Daphne to use a lathe and she had one of his old lathes at Tower Folly, albeit by then worn and no longer a precision tool. John also admitted to teasing Daphne over his Meccano set that she wanted to play with. Daphne had to watch John make, say a crane ,then he would tighten all the nuts and bolts before walking away leaving Daphne to dismantle his work.”

Carolyn said, “there were three main early influences on Arthur, John and Daphne namely their father James, mother Ida and their home which gave them space to both work together and follow their own particular interests.”

I’m eternally grateful to Carolyn Scales, Daphne’s niece, for a fascinating insight into Daphne’s early years and family life, and for the photographs too. It seems her curious childhood nature was focused on what makes music, and her engineering skills were honed early, enhanced by her intrigue and not being allowed to assist by her elder brothers. This led her to create the Oramics Machine, her early synthesiser, built in the 1960s, but lost after her death. We should concentrate our efforts on Daphne’s work in the third part, and how it shaped modern music……

Daphne Oram; Devizes’ Unsung Pioneer of Electronic Sound

Part 1: An Introduction

March 1936: newlywed French telecommunications engineer Pierre Schaeffer relocates to Paris from Strasbourg and finds work in radio broadcasting. He embarks on early radiophonic experiments. Fifteen years of his research, his inventions of various electronic instruments, and collaborations with Pierre Henry would lead them to found Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. Musique concrète would be the root of the utilisation of modified recorded sound through audio signal processing and tape techniques.

Across the channel, it’s the St. Clement’s Fair in Devizes. The town hall is decorated with a foliage of oranges and lemons, and the “Bells of St Clement’s” was recited with handbells to declare the fair open. Devizes Congregationsts arranged a small eisteddfod, which would be the origins of today’s Devizes Eisteddfod, founded ten years later to raise funds for the Congregational Church, opposite Wadworth’s Brewery.

The connection? Well, two cups were awarded by the minister Rev. W.S.H Hallett; one for Ruth Mead for a vocal solo, and the second to eleven-year-old Daphne Oram, for a pianoforte solo. The daughter of James and Ida Oram, Daphne was educated at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset, where she was tutored in piano and musical composition.

Daphne Oram as a young girl dressed as Alice in Wonderland with family, for the Devizes Carnival: Source Wiltshire Museum

At seventeen Daphne moved to London, turned down a place at the Royal College of Music, to become a junior sound engineer at the BBC, where she would “shadow” concerts with a pre-recorded version, allowing the broadcast to continue despite interference or blackouts due to air raids.

Throughout the 1940s Daphne devoted herself to the pioneering of electronic sound, labouring into the night composing various pieces, most far too avant-garde for the traditionalist BBC bosses to consider publishing. Promoted to music studio manager after a decade, she eventually convinced the BBC to the benefits of electronic music and musique concréte for use in programming; particularly for The BBC Third Programme, replaced by BBC Radio 3. By 1957 they caved, and Daphne was appointed the original co-director of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop with Senior Studio Manager Desmond Briscoe.

Their early efforts were for radio: radiophonic poems, effects for prevalent sci-fi serials like Quatermass and The Pit, and comedy sounds for The Goon Show. Yet Daphne’s motivation remained in electronic music production, and she resigned in 1959 to freelance, moving again to Kent.

Daphne Oram was way ahead of her time, a visionary frustrated with the direction The Radiophonic Workshop was heading, because electronic music was still in its infancy, especially the acceptance of it. The workshop continued without her and eventually branched into music, as television took over.

A trainee assistant studio manager called Delia Derbyshire joined the workshop, creating numerous scores and effects for television programmes. Most notably in 1963, when Derbyshire electronically modified Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme, hailed as the pinnacle moment in the advancement of electronic music in Britain. Though, BBC bureaucracy as it was, Delia was never credited on-screen for it until twelve years after her passing, in a 2013 fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. Her work has since been acknowledged and revered, whilst Daphne Oram remains a relatively unsung heroine in the development of electronic music.

Futurist Luigi Russolo argues in a 1913 letter to composer Francesco Pratella, a manifesto referred to as The Art of Noises, that the ear will become accustomed to noises of urbanisation and industrial soundscapes, and thus mankind will develop a new sonic palette as technology progresses. A fascinating and accurate theory into the evolution of sound, in which Russolo encouraged musicians to listen to city sounds, which will putatively be the cymatics of future music.

I find myself reasoning if this explains why electronic music today is most popular in urban environments rather than rural. Due to music famed promoter Mel Bush, Devizes retains an affection for the blues, using authentic analogue instruments. Producers of electronic music are rare here. If you want dance music, which greater acquires the usage of technology than rock, blues, or folk, you may need to head towards Bristol, Swindon, or Salisbury.

But coming from a more urban background and growing up in the eighties and nineties, personally I’ve never outcasted electronics in music. Even if a musician is using analogue methods to create music, they will at the least use the internet to promote them. With eclectic tastes, I also love electronica, hip hop, dub, and dance music, and I love to explore the origins of it. So, this research project has me fascinated, the life and work of Daphne Oram, and her growing up in Devizes. I wondered how she became involved.

A graphical sound technique where shapes etched into filmstrips are read by photo-electric cells and transformed into for various parameters of sound is called Oramics, after its creator Daphne Oram at her Oramics Studios in Kent. She expressed hope that her work on Oramics would “plant seeds that would mature in the 21st century.” Her legacy is commemorated in the annual Oram Awards, and the 2022 BBC Masterbrand Sonic, was internally known as “Daphne,” but still in her hometown she’s not widely known, neither are her early years spent in Devizes well documented.

This month, Daphne would have celebrated her one-hundredth birthday. So, join me in an exploration of her life and work in a series of articles. We will talk with Daphne’s niece, Carolyn Scales, about her early years in Devizes, explore her work further, and talk with a local producer of electronic music about her legacy and the impact her work has on them. Because one thing is certain, without Daphne Oram music today would sound vastly different, at least it would in the UK, and during the boom of pop, as you should be aware, Britain led the way. I believe that it is worth commemorating and honouring her here in her birthplace, Devizes.

read part 2 here